Burry Professor of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics
Robin Lock and
Julia Palmateer '07 won the the 2007 Statistics In Sports poster competition
at the 2007 Joint Statistical Meetings in Salt Lake City, Utah. The project,
titled "Assessing Ratings Methods for College Hockey Teams," was part of Palmateer's
senior research.

The abstract states, "Many collegiate team sports in the United States are
organized with multiple leagues where teams play a fairly full schedule of
games against league opponents with a sparser schedule of games between teams
from different leagues. This often creates difficulties when teams are to be
compared across all leagues for national rankings or seeding in post season
tournaments. A number of methods have been proposed to calibrate teams while
accounting for performance and the quality of opponents. We use Monte Carlo
simulations of multiple seasons to compare several existing models, such as
raw winning percentage, rating percentage index (RPI), Bradley-Terry (KRACH)
and Poisson scoring rates (CHODR), for rating college ice hockey teams."